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Wednesday, July 29, 2015

Panel Vision - Killing Joke 30 Years Later

A couple weeks ago DC and Warner Brothers announced the
latest in a long line of fairly good animated film projects would be an
adaptation of Alan Moore’s The Killing
Joke.Since then actor Mark
Hamill has voiced a lot of interest in the part of the Joker.Hamill played the Joker in the insanely
popular Batman animated series from
the ‘90s as well as its subsequent Justice
League, Batman Beyond, and Mask of the Phantasm follow-ups.He was also the voice of the character
for the monster hit video game series Batman
Arkham, which enjoyed a very successful 4th installment earlier
this summer with Arkham Knight.Now DC/WB have officially cast Hamill
in the part, most likely in direct response to the net fan response Hamill’s
comments garnered over coupled with how similar his work in Arkham Knight is to a lot of aspects of The Killing Joke.The thing is a lot of people don’t see
this as a positive, coming down hard on the decision though their issue seems
more to be with the very fact that DC is making a Killing Joke movie at all.

For the most part I get why people are upset over DC making
a Killing Joke film from a strictly
cursory level.DC has had a
spectacular run of bad media production in the last 4 years between stuff like Green Lantern, Man of Steel, Injustice, that
failed Wonder Woman pilot, the first
season and a half of Arrow, Arkham Origins, and even Dark Knight Rises was far bellow their
previous standards.The thing is
none of that has really impacted their ability to do solid animated work aside
from maybe Beware the Batman.We’ve seen amazing gems like Batman Brave and the Bold, the CGI Green Lantern show, Young Justice, Teen Titans Go, and the amazing collection of DC
Nation shorts in the last few years.On the features side their stuff hasn’t been as mind blowingly good as
the Bruce Timm era but it’s been solid and enjoyable.Speaking of the Brucce Timm run of DC animation, that era
already shows how well DC animation can adapt the work of Alan Moore as some of
the best Justice League episodes of
that era (Twilight of the Gods and For the Man Who Has Everything) came from
Moore’s work.So there’s a really
solid precedent for DC animation turning in an amazing adaptation of Killing Joke especially with the
talented Mark Hamill on the handle for the Joker.I think what people object to when they hear The Killing Joke adaptation is what The Killing Joke has come to stand
for.

When The Killing Joke
came out it was rightfully hailed as a bold and innovative new direction for
the medium. The dark nature of the
storytelling at hand was coupled with interesting depth and real quality to say
nothing of a fair degree of tact in handling some of the story’s more
controversial aspects.Since then
however the geek landscape has thoroughly shifted, especially in regards to the
Joker.Over the past couple years
the Joker has slowly morphed into a character more defined by abject human
ugliness than pretty much anything else.This tract kind of started with Heath Ledger’s Joker but really it was in
the cards for the character well before that.Since then however we’ve had things like Brian Azzarello’s Joker graphic novel, the faceless Joker
from Death of the Family, and now the
Jared Leto version of the character who seems to draw central character
definition from being a child murderer.This even slipped into the earlier days of Grant Morrison’s Batman run during the ‘Clown at
Midnight’ special and Batman: RIP.It seems wherever you turn now a days
the Joker is defined as the most hideous human imaginable.So the question becomes, does that
invalidate the artistic value of The
Killing Joke?

This question has actually been on my mind for a while now,
as a similar issue looms large over a lot of other classic Joker stories.Great installments like Mad Love, Death in the Family, and Return of the Joker all bring with them
a niggling specter of uncomfortableness.Elements like the Joker’s final moments in Return of the Joker or the death of Jason Todd in Death in the Family suddenly loose their
immediate impact as shocking acts of violence; they’re still off-putting only
now it’s because of what they represent.I’m left wondering if these scenes were ever truly
affective and I just missed their emptiness before or if they remain powerful
scenes that have become tainted by everything done in the name of emulating
them without the same level of meaning.The worst of these instances however, is The Killing Joke as it’s probably the most grossly and disturbingly
violent and unnerving.

What’s more Killing
Joke is just a very different kind of comic than these contemporaries.Death
in the Family for all its uniqueness and violence is also full of late ‘70s
weirdness like Lady Shiva popping up or Joker becoming Iranian Ambassador to
the United Nations.The story
deflates its own violence in a way that neatly sidesteps any kind of fetishism
or fixation.Mad Love is more of a Harley Quinn story but it also keeps itself
thoroughly grounded in unambiguous tragedy about the Joker’s relationship to
this character.There, the
awfulness of his actions is more about their extreme damage on just one
person’s life and identity.Return of the Joker is actually a very
cogent indictment of the more ultra-violent and sadistic iteration of the
Joker.The climax of the film
perfectly highlights the Joker’s character as a tasteless and unfunny hack
while the textual progression of the film has the Joker die as a result of his
more extreme actions.That point
right there is what leads me back to The
Killing Joke and how its ambiguity has left it in something of a twilight
zone artistically now.

What The Killing Joke
falls on, in the end, is that its ultimate defense against tastelessness, its
meaning and subtext, fall flat.What The Killing Joke is about
on a deeper level has always been the clash of ideals between Batman and the
Joker, that’s why the Joker’s “origin” in The
Killing Joke is framed as a sort of inverse of Batman.They’re both men whose lives collapsed
under the weight of a horrible experience, Batman representing the ability to
turn tragedy into passion and motivation while the Joker is the flipside,
turning tragedy into an excuse to inflict pain upon others.Ultimately the comic frames Batman as
the victor of this conflict, he and his viewpoint rise above the Joker’s claim
by the end of the story.However,
there’s also a secondary meaning to the story that’s woven more into the
visuals of the plot and the continuity importance of The Killing Joke.

The major contribution The
Killing Joke made to Batman canon was that Barbara Gordon became paralyzed
from the waist down.The comic
forms a sharp, dividing line between the Batman mythos that was and what it
will be going forward.This is
visualized perfectly in the comic’s best single page, with the perfect
symbolism of Batman throwing down the Joker card in front of a picture of his
previous, silver age Bat-family.The secondary meaning of The
Killing Joke is about how the Joker changes Batman’s universe or, more
specifically, how he brings it down to his level.That’s why the ending to The
Killing Joke is so ambiguous despite Batman’s seeming ideological victory,
because even though the Joker didn’t break him or Commissioner Gordon he still
won, he still brought them down to his level of violence and mayhem.The
Killing Joke is the ultimate statement of the Joker ending any lingering
aspects of Batman’s less horrific past and ends up, whether intentionally or
not, framing violence, abuse, and pain as a form of “adulthood” for the
characters and their universe.

That’s why The Killing
Joke feels so off-putting as a thing to be excited about or praise after
the very dark turns Batman’s taken in modern media.Even despite the tact that goes into so much of the story’s
violence or the more commendable meaning about clashing ideology we can’t get
around the more detrimental and implicit themes of the story about meaningless,
abusive violence as a path to adulthood.That niggling feeling of discomfort in praising The Killing Joke is there because we know, deep down, that praising
the comic, saying its story should be emulated and is groundbreaking and
innovative; that’s us saying the Joker was right, and I don’t think we like how
that feels.